Our getting into winemaking was serendipitous. It started with a casual conversation in 2009 between me and my wife, Lin Wu, about what to do with a piece of land that we have in Moraga, California. The land is on a slope facing east and south, receiving a full dose of sunlight every day. After we vetoed several ideas, I jokingly suggested that we could grow grapes and make our own wine. Lin did not take it as a joke, she was very excited about this idea and started to list reasons why we should do that, from beautiful vineyard view to the benefit of grapevine roots grabbing the soil and preventing mudslides, to the exciting prospect of having our own wine. We both like drinking wine, but I was scared by the amount of work that it would take to grow grapes and make wine.
A few days later, several friends came to visit us: Ruhong Jiang and his wife Li Li, James Zhu and his wife Ping Ye, and Guoliang Yu and his wife Yingfei Wei. Eight of us have known each other for many years and shared many things in common. We all graduated from China’s Fudan University in the 1980’s and have been close friends since college. Now we all live in the San Francisco Bay Area and are all biology nerds working in healthcare industries. We travel for fun together at least once a year, and we all enjoy good food and fine wines. For these we received the nicknames Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan — after the friends from Duma's Three Musketeers. When Lin and I brought up the idea of starting our vineyard and making our own wine, they all jumped on the idea right away — coming to think about it, this should not be a surprise if you knew personalities of this group: curious, adventurous, and energetic. They contributed many ideas, offered their help in the winemaking process, and together we even came up with a name for our wine, “3+1 Wines”, where 3 stands for Ruhong’s, James and my family, and 1 for Guoliang’s family. inspired by all the excitement, I agreed to give it a try, still somewhat nervously.
Lin and I hired a team of professional grapevine growers led by Frank Soriano, and started with a small batch of 240 vines of Cabernet Sauvignon in our Moraga land. We also got to know winemaking experts Sal Captain and his wife Susan, who live in Moraga. I shadowed them for every step of winemaking for two years. In 2013 we made my first batch of Cabernet Sauvignon using the grapes we harvested from this Moraga land. That was a very good wine, a big hit for us! Encouraged by that success, we started to plant more vines. Today we have four different grape varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, and Zinfandel. Looking back, I think this is one of the best decisions we’ve made in my life. Little did I know at the beginning how much I would enjoy this adventure. When I make wine, it feels like a combination of cooking in the kitchen and doing molecular biology experiments in the lab, both are things I love.
Cheers,
3+1 winemaker, Jerry Shen